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Super Bowl Ads: Worth the Price Or Waste of Time?
samzenpus writes "Every year companies are willing to dish out big bucks to reach tens of millions of consumers with their Super Bowl ads. With an average price tag of $4 million for a 30-second commercial, this year is no exception. We've seen: beer obsessed frogs, field goal kicking horses, celebrities drinking various beverages, explosions of all sizes, homages to 1984, and day trading babies in the past. Since talking about the commercials has become almost as popular as the game itself, here's a place to do just that. What have you liked and what do you think would have been better left on the cutting room floor."
The superbowl doesn't change that.
Neither: Waste of Money.
I live in constant fear of the Coming of the Red Spiders.
slashdot news for nerds^H^H^H^H^H americans.
NSA and GCHQ not doin' it for ya?
It's no secret that Slashdot's traffic has been stagnant at best, if not decreasing. Alexa's and Compete's numbers don't paint a rosy picture. Their estimates aside, I think it's obvious that Slashdot's popularity and influence has been on a decline for some time now.
Shitty, irrelevant stories like these do not help. This story is purely about marketing. There's absolutely no technological aspect to it. Nor are science or math involved. This story does not belong on Slashdot, plain and simple.
This is the kind of crap we can find at reddit. We come here to Slashdot specifically because we don't want to see stories like these!
The new ultra-shitty beta site sure doesn't help the situation. Now we get to see irrelevant, unwanted stories displayed worse than they currently are, with discussion that's much harder to follow, and damn near impossible to participate in.
Slashdot likely won't ever regain the influential position it once had. Shitty stories like this and the shitty beta site will make that a certainty, though. They'll continue to drive away the few remaining users.
Ads are not sold by the second, but rather by a price per thousand viewers, known as CPM or Cost Per Thousand. On a CPM basis the Super Bowl ads are equal or below the cost of regular ads... If you want to reach a lot of people they can be an effective part of a marketing mix.
http://www.hawknest.com/
I want the Radio Shack of the 80s back. Really, anything would be better than the abomination it's been turned into.
Remember: the primary job of advertisers is selling advertising, not selling the stuff that's being advertised. They put a lot of effort into convincing people that advertising is effective.
Absolutely. It's the ONLY time of the year you can buy a commercial and if it's moderately funny have people actually go out and LOOK for your commercial to see it again. Where else can you get your commercial to be talk around the water cooler? We're still talking about 1984 30 years later....
Yeah, because it's not like Slashdot had stories about the Superbowl during its heyday.
Better known as 318230.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R... Look up "M" in the table. In the dim dark past, probably before you were born, printers were using "M" to mean "thousand". And I too have been on Slashdot for a fair amount of time, for what it's worth.
Yep, and they seem to be banking on this SlashCloud and SlashBI, etc. SlashBullShit as of late so I bet they're going in the "original content" with minimal user interaction/minimal community direction. I bet the slashdot.org domain will be up for cheap in a couple years when DICE has finished looting the last corpse here so if someone still has an installation of SlashCode laying around we could probably get the site back up to speed pretty quickly in that eventuality.
It must suck to be Malda and see your website baby all grown up to be a junkie whore like this.
I, for one, am looking forward to the inevitable
Hey, guys -- THEY STILL SELL PARTS. They've just compacted them into a set of shallow drawers, rather than displaying them on pegboard. I haven't counted, but it seems to me that they've got a better selection of components than they did in the 80s. Besides the obvious (how many varieties of blue LEDs and microcontrollers did they carry in 1980?), they've still got fairly robust coverage of things like DC connectors and resistors/capacitors/other passive stuff.
I miss having the nerd stuff prominently displayed, but if they need to give more square footage to phones to stay afloat, I'm happy to pull out drawers instead of seeing it all disappear.
(Remember Lafayette Electronics, another chain that sold components? If so, you're old, too.)
**Some** Radio Shack stores still sell parts, mostly the stand-alone stores. The ones in the malls are almost completely cellphones and junk R/C toys.
"Think about how stupid the average person is. Now, realise that half of them are dumber than that." - George Carlin
You mean, like subscription TV service, aka, cable or satellite? I vaguely remember when our house got hooked up for cable about 30-ish years ago and the promise* then was that the cable-based channels would be mostly ad-free since we were paying up front. That lasted more or less 10-15 years I'd say (if you give networks a pass on promos for their own lineups).
Then you're misremembering. There's a huge difference between ad-free networks being mostly on cable (the actual historical situation) and cable being mostly ad-free networks (how many people incorrectly remember the "good ol' days" of cable). Cable television has always had advertisements, barring a few notable premium channels such as HBO and, of course, public television stations. Many channels were nothing but ads, such as home shopping channels and local access stations that ran infomercials for something like 20 out of 24 hours a day.
Originally, cable television was merely a way to get television into areas that were unable to receive broadcast signals, thanks to geography or other factors, and carried only the networks, which had ads. Eventually some "superstations" rose up that were only available via cable out-of-market, the first of which was Ted Turner's WTCG (later WTBS) and eventually stations like WGN and WOR, and all of those had ads. Later, almost all cable-only channels such as ESPN, MTV, and CNN have run ads since their inception.
What you're mostly likely remembering is the commercials for specific premium channels like HBO, Cinemax, Showtime, Starz, and Disney (prior to 1997) that advertised that their channels were ad-free, but these were the exception and commanded extra fees in addition to your normal cable bill, not true of cable television in general.
I honestly don't understand why Apple is on this list. They're pretty much the final computer company that will just sell you a computer, and not tie it into a million services that track your identity, and try to spam you/sell you.
Setting up Mavericks:
- "Oh, hey, sign in with your AppleID for everything iCloud!" No, shut up, I don't need your crap.
- "You really should turn on location services so we know where you are at any given time!" No, shut up, you don't need that.
- "Hey, in order to update the applications that come with the OS by default, you're going to need an AppleID with a credit card attached." No, shut up.
Please, tell me again how Apple isn't trying to tie me into a million services that track me.